Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, may only be six months old, but rumours are already abound as to the next update to Apple's operating system. According to severalsources, it's going to be called Snow Leopard, it won't contain any major new features, and is planned to go gold master December 2008, available a month later. The big rumour: it's going to be available for 64bit Intel machines only.

The Unoffical Apple Weblog had the scoop this morning, stating several sources claim Apple will supposedly show the new operating system to the public for the first time at the coming Worldwide Developers' Conference, including a developers' seeding. It won't contain any major new features, but instead it will focus on speed and stability, while also dropping support for anything but 64bit Intel machines. That's going to be rough if you bought a PowerMac G5 Quad.

People familiar with the situation have confirmed to us that TUAW's details are true - Snow Leopard is currently on track to come out during next January's Macworld, and it will not contain major OS changes. Instead, the release is heavily focused on performance and nailing down speed and stability.

A possibility is that Snow Leopard will be Cocoa-only, but this is apparently not yet set in stone, and what exactly "Cocoa-only" means is up for debate. Fact is that Carbon is not available in 64bit flavour.